


Yield

by skoosiepants



Series: Directional [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 06:23:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7423552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skoosiepants/pseuds/skoosiepants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The three people that Draco tolerated the most on this insanely godawful and yet somehow fulfilling post on Atlantis, other than his teammates, were Blaise, obviously, because Blaise was the sort of best friend who didn’t care if you were an arsehole, and Abbott, because she had a no-nonsense demeanor that Draco appreciated in a doctor, and Weasley, for some insanely unknowable reason that often made him want to stab his eyes out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Yield

**Author's Note:**

> For Lissadiane, who desperately wanted me to have Ron and Draco kiss :)
> 
> Finally, after nearly ten years, this is the last installment of my Directional series! Woo! This was written fairly fast today, so forgive any errors. The hardest part of picking this up after a decade was trying to write everything in past tense :/ Enjoy!

If anyone ever asked Draco why he’d become an astrophysicist, why he’d bothered to get a PhD when his father owned a sizable chunk of the industrial UK, he usually either gave them a bland, bored stare or told them to piss off. He never said anything about his love for the science itself. He never told anyone that he’d concentrated in physics for the express purpose of tipping his father that much closer to stroking out in fury, as he’d expected him to blindly follow in his footsteps since he could walk the floor unaided, but that he’d kept on with it because there was something so beautiful and tragic in the theoretical. In possibilities.

He wasn’t passionate about a great many things, was known for his languid disdain even, but the day the SGC approached him about his work, he’d nearly kissed the poor lieutenant sent to escort him to the States. He’d buried himself in the mountain for months before even blinking into earthly sunshine again.

He’d written to his father exactly once before setting sail for Atlantis. He’d told him to go fuck himself. He wasn’t planning on coming back.

*

Draco was an acquired taste, he knew that very well. Lee and Samuels had taken the better part of a month to warm up to him, fresh off the Daedalus, and Miller—well. He didn’t have to worry about Miller anymore, did he? They may not have all been great friends, but they’d forged a fairly quick bond of trust, built layer upon layer from off-world missions gone both right and wrong. He knew Lee blamed himself for the spectacular fuck-up that cost them Miller, and for a little while Draco did too.

But they’d pushed through it. They’d gotten Granger—unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you looked at it, but beggars certainly couldn’t be choosers.

“One day,” Lee said, a pipette of grass clenched between his teeth at the side of his mouth, “you’ll actually manage to sell her, and then what will you do?”

“Celebrate,” Draco said dryly. The sky above them on PX7 was that dense shade of blue that appeared minutes before twilight. The shadows at their feet were steadily pooling together, the three moons on the horizon were burnished gold, heavy with color, and Granger’s hair was large and hilarious in the thick, humid air.

Granger pinched her lips together, but the sparkle in her eyes told him she didn’t quite believe his hype anymore. It was galling, the ways in which Granger—a know-it-all harpy who’d somehow managed to entrap his best friend—had become complacent about his entire being. And also slightly nice. There was a ruthlessness about Granger that Draco had come to grudgingly admire.

Samuels clapped him on the back hard enough for him to stumble, but held on to his shoulder to keep him upright as well.

“Children,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

*

The three people that Draco tolerated the most on this insanely godawful and yet somehow fulfilling post on Atlantis, other than his teammates, were Blaise, obviously, because Blaise was the sort of best friend who didn’t care if you were an arsehole, and Abbott, because she had a no-nonsense demeanor that Draco appreciated in a doctor, and Weasley, for some insanely unknowable reason that often made him want to stab his eyes out.

It could be his forearms, or the roundness of his shoulders, or the way his arse filled out a pair of BDUs. But given the fact that Weasley’d been whittled down to nearly nothing bit by bit by the Pegasus galaxy over the past year, the initial attractiveness of strength and brawny handsomeness didn’t seem to hold up over time.

That didn’t stop his heart from thumping louder every time Weasley limped— _limped_ , for god’s sake—into a room. It didn’t stop his cheeks from heating and from Blaise giving him a knowing elbow in the ribs. Sometimes Draco had to fight the urge to press his hands to his chest, to knock his forehead into the wall and moan quietly about all the ways Weasley shouldn’t impress this upon him, and yet clearly, unrelentingly did.

Weasley had a problem with almost dying in Draco’s arms, and Draco was terribly afraid he’d gotten some sort of perverse knight-errant complex. That all this horrible _love_ in his heart sprang from a deep well of weakness for damsels in distress.

“Love,” he groaned, a bottle of whiskey hugged to his belly. “It can’t be love, Blaise. He smells like utter shit nearly all the time. He still blames me for those seagulls, I know it. He’ll never forgive me for _Harold_.” That damn imprinted bird that stared at Draco with black, beady eyes like he was the devil. He really wanted to cook and eat him. Weasley would never forgive him for that, either.

“I’m sure it’ll fade,” Blaise said unconvincingly from his sprawl on Draco’s bed. Blaise didn’t believe that anything would fade—it’s why he was so stubborn about Granger. Blaise radiated a lazy calm that belied a core of unbendable steel and willful ignorance. It was incredibly annoying.

And he was right, anyway—it wasn’t going to fade. It hadn’t faded when Weasley had gotten nearly all of his blood all over Draco’s brand new uniform pants. It hadn’t faded when Weasley’d forgotten their fucking rope and had to use himself as a human ladder to save Draco from a painful, rocky death. It hadn’t faded when they’d screamed at each other about the goddamn motherfucking seagulls that plagued Draco’s balcony, or when Weasley continually and easily beat Draco at their games of opponent-blind chess.

Draco would, very seriously, like to climb Weasley like a tree, but unfortunately Weasley currently didn’t have the stamina for that.

“I want to cook him soup, but I have no idea how,” Draco said. He was depressingly not drunk enough to excuse that line of thought, but Blaise didn’t have to know that.

Blaise arched an eyebrow at him and said, “I know.”

*

Draco sent monthly emails to his mother. He told her he was eating well (a lie) and staying safe (an even bigger lie) and would possibly be home for Christmas—the biggest lie of all, considering he didn’t have any leave left until the new year, and even if he did he wouldn’t spend it anywhere near the manor and his father. They were polite fictions, though, because his mother knew exactly why he was lying and wouldn’t care for the truth.

They didn’t keep him up at night.

The nightmares occasionally did.

*

It was funny, given that the scales of life-saving were tipped decidedly in his favor, how much of his nightmares were of him dying. Of him getting the life sucked out of him, a pasty white claw pressed painfully to his chest. Of getting ripped apart, numbly bleeding out alone on the cold, rocky ground. Of his lungs swallowing water, making him sink like a stone. It wasn’t until he woke up coughing, back sore and arms weak, that he realized he wasn’t even having nightmares about _himself_.

That apparently his greatest fear wasn’t the myriad of horrid deaths that awaited him in the Pegasus galaxy, the terror of the Wraith, but all the ways Weasley had already almost died. His chest still ached with phantom spasms, and he was up to snuff enough with the weirdness of Atlantis to know that while there was a good chance this was probably just his new normal, it could also be a case of Ancient tech gone wrong.

“Fuck,” he breathed, head cradled in his hands.

Fuck, he was so screwed.

*

Abbott sat with her hands on Draco’s knees, leaning forward, and Draco was both grateful for the warm grounding of her palms and also the way her mouth and eyes were tempered with a quiet, strong seriousness.

She said, “I don’t know what to tell you, Malfoy,” in a gentle way that didn’t make him feel completely stupid.

Which was nice, considering the fact that a humiliated Malfoy tended to lash out indiscriminately. It was just one of the many traits he hated his father for, but would never say to anyone out loud.

“Right,” Draco said. He fought the urge to cover her hands with his own. “Of course.”

She squeezed him once before letting go. “We could run the tests again.”

“No. No, that’s all right,” Draco said. He knew they’d just say the same thing to him again—that he was abnormally attached to Ron Weasley through the power of his own mind. That he only had himself to blame. It had been a long shot, anyway.

“Well.” Abbott got to her feet, briskly straightening the ends of her lab coat. “It could be worse, Malfoy.”

“Tell me how,” Draco said plaintively before he could stop himself. How could this be any worse, knowing that he was all in with a tall, oblivious xenobiologist that was quickly running out of luck and lives? That there was nothing he could do about it?

She tipped her head. “It could be Finch-Fletchly.”

Draco conceded the point.

*

Draco expected, once they started letting Weasley off-world again—and who the hell’s idea was _that?_ Draco’d had a quiet panic attack in his rooms after finding out that no one would ever know about—that Weasley wouldn’t last a month before sustaining another life-threatening injury. Draco had become hypervigilant on missions when out with him, and a pathetic insomniac when Weasley went traipsing off with someone else.

Which was why he was so surprised when the knife went through his chest. It sliced in so slick and smooth Draco hardly felt it, at first. Just a pinprick of pain before he tasted blood, before his heart caught fire and his legs went numb.

 _This is what Ron must feel like all the time_ , he thought, before little spots of blackness dotted his vision and he promptly, thankfully passed out.

*

He came to in a puddlejumper, body jostled by a jerk of the ship—he was strapped down, but he couldn’t move his limbs anyway.

“We’re dialing in now,” Weasley said, voice frantic as he pressed palms to Draco’s face, his throat. His hands felt cool, but removed, like maybe Draco wasn’t really feeling them against his skin.

Weasley said, “I don’t think he’s breathing,” and Draco realized Weasley wasn’t even talking to him at all.

His mouth wouldn’t move and his eyes wouldn’t blink and he wondered, idly, if this was what death really felt like. This numb, floaty feeling, like the only thing holding him down was Weasley’s cool palms and the pure panic in his words when he said, “If you fucking die on me, Malfoy, _I will kill you_.”

There was a sheen of wetness in Weasley’s eyes and Draco wanted to thumb at the corners to swipe the stray tears away, wanted to drum up a fond chide, wanted to tell him that sobbing over any boy was an embarrassment, _have you no shame?_

And then his vision dimmed again, but Draco could still hear Weasley cry out, hoarse, “You bastard,” and he could feel something wet-warm brush high up on his cheek, his forehead, and the slick-with-blood crease of his mouth.

*

When he woke up, he was in the infirmary. Everything was fuzzy with a haze of drugs, aches and pains, but Draco could see Lee sprawled in a chair, snoring, and Samuels sacked out on the bed across from him. He couldn’t feel his torso, exactly, but he clenched and relaxed his hands at his sides, reveling in the pull of muscles up and down his arms.

Slowly, a dull ache banding across his eyes, he rolled his head to look at the other side of the room. Granger was staring at him, red-eyed, hair at particularly stunning levels of dishevelment, even for her. There were black smudges on her cheeks and the small hands curled over the rails of his bed were covered in a disturbing amount of dried blood.

Draco wanted to say, _You look like a serial killer_ , or, _Lovely as always, Granger_ , or even, _Here to finish the job?_ But all he could croak out was, “I died.”

“You did,” Granger said on a shaky, in-drawn breath.

No almost about it, he knew. He had _died_. He’d felt it, like he wasn’t there anymore, and—he felt surprisingly calm about it all right then. Strange.

She helped him sip at a water, straightened his sheets around him as he shifted back flat, fussed at his blankets until she stared down at her hands and realized she was flaking off dirt and blood everywhere.

Still. She didn’t leave.

Finally, Draco swallowed hard and said, “Weasley?” It wasn’t that he expected him to be there, except he was fairly sure Weasley had kissed him, when he thought he was going to die— _did_ die, Christ—so. There was hope, and Draco was in a weakened state. His blatant neediness could be excused.

Granger said, “He’s out punching things.”

“He’ll hurt himself,” Draco said, and Granger let out a bark of laughter that turned, absurdly, swiftly, into quiet tears.

*

Recovery was slow. The sharpness of the knife had been both a blessing and a curse—a more swift path to death, but an easier wound to stitch closed.

Weasley had given him blood, as well as Lee.

They wheeled his bed to a window, so he could look out at the sea. He’d asked for a chessboard, but that stubborn fuck-wit of a Weasley wouldn’t show—there was nothing _Draco_ could do, he could barely move to piss, and each day that passed he grew less and less certain that the kisses had happened at all. That they weren’t just a fever dream, a figment tossed out by his dying brain.

He pressed fingers to his cheek and watched the gulls circle the spires.

He closed his eyes and felt the sickening pressure in his chest where the blade had cut through.

He was slowly but surely going mad, lying there in the quiet, and there was only so much Lee and Samuels could do to entertain him. Lee was much too silent, and Samuels had a habit of patting him too hard on the shoulder when he didn’t know what to say. Granger hadn’t visited since that first night he woke, and honestly it was better that way. Truly. He had a terrible feeling she was going to wait until he called for her, to be smug all over the place with her awkward comfort, and Draco was going to hold out against that for as long as humanly possible.

It was well into a week before Finnigan and Finch-Fletchly showed up, and he even reveled in _that_ attention.

Finnigan stared at him in fascination. He said, “So did you see a bright light? Were the demons calling you home?”

“I hate you,” Draco said, even as he moved his legs to make room for Finch-Fletchly to sit on the end of the bed.

“Nah, you love us,” Finch-Fletchly said. He pulled out a stack of cards with a flourish. “’Cause we come baring gifts. Anyone for a little game of War?”

*

At six weeks post-op he was allowed to go back to his own rooms. He was allowed to walk the halls and eat at the mess and do almost everything he did before dying and being brought back to life. He had to be careful of his stitches and sometimes he had to take a good long rest between walks, but that just meant he hovered over the chessboard in the common lounge far longer than usual.

He would probably never be sure if Weasley would have sought him out, otherwise, or if it was just a happy coincidence that he was poised over a pawn when their eyes caught across the room. Draco held his breath, curled the pawn into the palm of his hand.

And then Weasley was stalking toward him, purposefully, mouth set and eyes hard.

Weasley was infuriatingly blasé with his own life. He had fatalistic outlook that drove Draco near insane, but apparently that didn’t extend to the lives of all the people around him.

He grabbed at Draco’s wrist, fingers so tight around the bone that Draco dropped the chess piece carelessly on the floor. He looked angry, color high on his cheeks, but he was careful with his arms, with the way he drew Draco closer.

“That is never happening again,” Weasley demanded of him, like Draco had any control over crazed, knife-happy villagers, of any of the worlds they ever ‘gated to throughout the galaxy.

Still, Draco said, “Getting murdered is never very high on my list of things to do, Weasley.” He even managed a sneer, but his heart wasn’t really in it. His palm was flat on Weasley’s belly, wrist still caught, and the blue of Weasley’s eyes was really very pretty—cornflower, with little flecks of black.

Weasley closed his eyes, pained, then said, “Fuck it,” and kissed him. Soft and light, a question, and then harder when Draco just clenched his fingers in the front of his shirt—because fucking _finally_.

Draco’s father would say that signs of affection in public were undignified.

His father would say that Weasley was too garish for him, too common, too _ginger_. Too big and raw-boned, filled with hearty peasant genes, too everything the opposite of the Malfoy name.

These were, surprisingly, not the reasons Draco kissed him back.

*

Weasley said, “I’m going to take you apart with my bare hands.”

Draco said, “Kinky,” without looking up from his computer.

“You’re _infuriating_ ,” Weasley said, and Draco finally blinked up at his tone, at the way Weasley’s face was a particularly fetching shade of blotchy red. It was amazing how much Draco still found that attractive. He couldn’t wait to tell his mother all about him.

“I’m unclear on the issue here.” They’d had a good morning, a grope in the transporter after lunch, and a conversation with Granger about Boot’s delicate sensibilities and appropriate laboratory behavior directly before dinner—all and all a productive day.

Weasley crossed his arms over his chest and loomed menacingly. “McKay told me I’m off the ‘gate team rotation. Because you asked him to.”

“Oh, that,” Draco waved a hand and bent back down over his work. Like that had been hard; nobody even really wanted to take Weasley off-world anymore, not unless it was strictly necessary. McKay had basically been looking for a reason to ground Weasley completely, but Sheppard had told him he couldn’t arbitrarily take willing scientists off teams because they were bad luck.

“You’re not in charge of me, Malfoy!” Weasley said, which was where he was wrong. Draco was most certainly in charge of him, they’d already had their emergency contact files changed accordingly.

Draco arched an eyebrow up at him. “I believe we came to that conclusion two nights ago,” he said, just to watch Weasley blush harder.

It was a difficult feat, to edge that line between anger, embarrassment and that famous apoplectic Weasley fury. Draco enjoyed poking the beast.

“I’ll show you in charge,” Weasley muttered, and Draco only let out a little manly yelp when Weasley shoved his chair out with a foot and scooped him up.

Draco relaxed into Weasley’s hold and said, “I hope you weren’t expecting me to complain.” Manhandling would always be exciting, and then there was the added bonus of Weasley actually being healthy enough to heft him bridal style down the long corridor toward their rooms. Draco would never say it out loud; it wasn’t exactly a normal kind of kink. For Atlantis maybe, though, who knew?

Weasley shot him a dark look. He said, “I’m going out with Hicks’ team tomorrow.”

Draco patted the side of his neck and said, “We’ll see.”

*

Blaise had been Draco’s closest friend since their beginnings at SGC. Since before Blaise met and wooed Granger, since before they were ever allowed to step foot through the Stargate.

Blaise stood in front of the large window in the common lounge that looked out across the towers of Atlantis, hands on his hips. They watched the dying light, the reflection of the hot ball of sun burn through the water at the horizon—there was an explosion of stars above them, both foreign and achingly familiar.

“I’m never going back,” Blaise said happily.

Draco said, “No.” They might have to, eventually—the military will force them, the Wraith would destroy too many worlds, the nano-bots would break them apart, piece by piece. But no. No, Draco didn’t really think any of them were ever going back.

Blaise slid him a sly look. “You really like him.”

“You’re really _married_ ,” Draco said, because that blindsided just about everyone two years ago, and the only surprising thing about their divorce was that it didn’t actually happen, in the end.

“You _love_ him,” Blaise said.

Draco sighed. “That would sting more if we hadn’t already established that as fact.”

Blaise’s eyes went soft. He said, “I’m truly happy for you, Draco. That’s all.”

Draco wasn’t sure if any of them should be happy. Or maybe they should be as happy as possible for as long as they could—there were no guarantees, particularly when living in a world that wanted you dead.

Weasley was off with Hicks and Teague. With Finnigan and _Finch-Fletchly_ , and the only bright spot to that disaster in the waiting was their infamous luck in dodging bullets and spears.

Blaise nudged their shoulders together and Draco let himself lean in. The dark outside was brightened by the planet’s moons, the healed wound in Draco’s chest ached with each pump of blood. Tomorrow would be another day.

Across the lounge was an empty chessboard, pieces messily dropped into a box beside it. They’d had less inclination to play, for all the time they spent together now.

He’d let Ron set it up again, when he got home.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes I write stuff on [tumblr](http://pantstomatch.tumblr.com)


End file.
